Kitabı oku: «The Way We Eat Now», sayfa 3

Eating in South Africa, a parched land with relatively poor soil quality, has never been ‘heaven on earth’, as South African dietitian Mpho Tshukudu has written. There is no golden age of food to return to. But nor have South Africans ever had to face food dilemmas quite like the ones they face today on a daily basis. One mother in her forties who came to Tshukudu’s clinic recalled that as a child growing up in a rural village, she walked for miles and ate home-cooked foods every day, always with a vegetable or some kind of legume. She knew no one who was obese and never needed to visit a doctor. But now, this woman lived in the city with her husband and three children and they all ate a lot of takeaway food and were frequently unwell. Her nine-year-old daughter was already so big that, to her distress, she had to buy her clothes in the grown-up section of the store.¹⁸

In some ways, South Africa’s new unhealthy pattern of eating is distinctive to the country itself, and to the injustice of the apartheid years. During apartheid, the state controlled who moved to towns and who stayed in the country and no black farmers were allowed to own land outside the ‘homelands’. Adults living in black townships often had long commutes to jobs in the white cities which left less time for cooking than in the past and as a result, some of the old traditional dishes died out.

But the most extreme and sudden changes to South African eating happened after the end of apartheid in the mid-1990s, during and after Nelson Mandela’s presidency, when thousands of black South Africans were lifted out of poverty for the first time. People were free to move to the cities; and they did. By many metrics, life got better and easier, but much of what people were eating now was less healthy than it had been before. As a newly open economy, the country was flooded with fast food and processed food from both home and abroad. From 2005 to 2010, the sales of processed snack bars in South Africa increased by more than 40 per cent.¹⁹

New freedom and city living; new snacks and abundance; new obesity and type 2 diabetes: the patterns of both eating and health have shifted fast in South Africa since the 1990s. The speed at which diets are changing here is vertiginous, yet the pattern is a familiar one. It is almost as if South Africa – along with so many other countries in the world – is following a script for eating set by America fifty or so years ago.

Stage four

Growing up in 1950s Wisconsin, Barry Popkin drank only tap water and milk, except for a small glass of orange juice to start the day. His father drank tea and his mother had coffee. At the weekend, as he has explained in his 2009 book The World is Fat, his parents might take a glass of wine for a treat. No one in Popkin’s family drank sweetened lattes or sugary energy drinks and the adults would not have dreamed of drinking alcohol every day. There were no smoothies and no white chocolate mocha frappuccinos. Popkin – Professor of Nutrition at Chapel Hill University, North Carolina – has made it his life’s mission to study the reasons why our patterns of eating and drinking are so different from those of the past; and to figure out ways to save the best of the changes and move beyond the worst of them.²⁰

During the months when I was first researching this book, it felt as if all roads led to Barry Popkin. Whether I was looking for hard facts on snacking or sugar or statistics about how food had changed in China over the past decade, Popkin always seemed to have co-authored the definitive paper on the subject. He was also involved in working with governments to create better food policies in many countries including Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Brazil. His website showed a photo of a cheery-looking man in his seventies with a white beard, but this Popkin was so prolific, I was starting to doubt whether he really existed, or whether he was in fact a team of nutrition academics working out of a factory somewhere.

When I contacted Popkin to arrange a telephone interview, he emailed straight back and told me he was having a ‘horrendous’ week but could take my call at 9 a.m. EST precisely on Monday morning. A gruff-voiced man answered the phone and immediately started explaining how food had radically changed in recent years, not just for a few people but for billions across the world. He spoke with great authority about the marketing of crisps and convenience foods; about the rise of highly sweetened drinks and the fall of home cooking. ‘It’s a radical change,’ Popkin told me, ‘and it’s going to be a big battle to reverse it.’

Popkin’s interest in nutrition started, he has written, during a year in India in 1965–6 when he was an economics student living in shantytowns in Old Delhi. India was a shock because after his modest but comfortable American childhood, Popkin was exposed to the extremes of hunger first hand. Returning to the States determined to use economics to help improve the way people ate, he assumed that the great problem to be solved with respect to nutrition would always be hunger.²¹

By the 1980s, however, Popkin had noticed that obesity had begun to replace hunger as the main nutritional problem in the Western world and he observed, aghast, as the same set of chronic diseases swept across the globe. He was one of the first experts in the field to argue that obesity was a global problem, not a phenomenon of the West. Popkin coined the phrase ‘nutrition transition’ to explain the changes he saw happening around the world as countries developed from poverty to riches. As a country becomes richer and more open to global markets, its population almost inexorably starts to eat differently, consuming more oil and meat and sugar and snack foods and fewer wholegrains and pulses. Wherever this diet was adopted, Popkin noticed, it brought with it easier lives as well as a host of diseases.²²

One way to think about human history is as a series of diet transitions, with each stage driven by changes in the economy and society, plus shifts in technology, climate and population. In the beginning, we were hunter-gatherers, eating a mostly low-fat diet of varied wild greens, berries and wild animals. During the Upper Paleolithic Period, which began about fifty thousand years ago, more than half of our food came from plants and the rest came from animals. In these societies, people were forced to collaborate to collect food. We had discovered fire but not cooking pots. Life expectancy was low – you were at risk of dying a violent death, if infectious diseases didn’t get you first. But the archaeological record suggests that (depending on where in the world they lived) the humans in this phase who survived into adulthood experienced mostly good health, with few nutritional deficiencies.

Stage two, starting around 20,000 BCE, was the agricultural age, which was characterised by a switch to staple cereals and a huge increase in population. Now we had clay cooking vessels and more sophisticated grindstones at our disposal. The hunter-gatherer diet of wild plants and meats gave way to diets based on staple cereals, whether it was the rice and millet of China or the barley of Mesopotamia. Farming bestowed huge benefits. It created food surpluses for the first time, which freed many people from the task of food gathering and gave rise to vast new civilisations such as that of the Indus Valley, where modern-day Pakistan lies. Grains were a very efficient way to generate calories from the land. Without agriculture there would have been no cities, no politics, no human civilisation as we know it.

The downside of farming, however, was that it gave people a less varied range of foods than before. Along with the adoption of staple cereals, phase two saw a rise of famine and a sudden increase in diet-related problems. With diets that were often inadequate both in quantity and quality, humans shrank in stature and suffered from a range of deficiency diseases. The difference in human health between the diets of stage one and stage two is the rationale behind the popular ‘Paleo diet’ in which modern dieters try to turn the clock back by ten thousand years or so and eat as if farming had never been invented.

Then again, to find a diet healthier than the one most people eat today, we don’t need to go back thousands of years. In Europe, we could go back a mere couple of hundred years to the third stage, which Popkin calls ‘receding famine’. During this period, advances in agriculture such as crop rotation and fertiliser led to a more varied and plentiful diet, with fewer starch-based staples and a bigger variety of vegetables along with animal protein. In stage three, the possibilities of cooking expanded, with new methods of drying and preserving and pickling. This period also witnessed a slow decline in mortality. Many of the old deficiency diseases – such as scurvy and beri beri – became less common as diets became more nourishing. On Popkin’s model, many sub-Saharan African countries are living through this stage now. This would explain why their diets compare so favourably, in Imamura’s paper, with those of the industrialised world.

But then comes stage four, which is where we are now. This era is different in quality from any of the other stages. Suddenly, the diet changes much more rapidly, with consequences for human health which are more extreme. The economy shifts away from manual labour and towards mechanisation, people move from the countryside to cities and they start to expend less energy. There are revolutions in food processing and marketing and people start to eat more fat, more meat and more sugar, with far less fibre. Stage four sees human life expectancy hit new highs with the decline of deficiency diseases and the breakthroughs of modern medicine. But it also sees populations suffering from diet-related chronic illness as never before. The ‘nutrition transition’ happened all over the Western world in the decades after the Second World War and is now happening even faster among low- and middle-income nations in the rest of the world. This transition explains why our food is sickening us now, through excess rather than hunger.

Stage four is a radical break with the past which represents a reinvention of food and what it means for human life. One of the greatest departures of stage four is the new homogeneity of food. As agriculture becomes a vast international form of trade, people start relying on the same small number of global crops, even when they live oceans and continents apart.

For centuries, eaters have marked high days and holidays with moreish fried foods such as fritters and doughnuts. Only in modern times, however, could a person buy a stackable carton of fried crisps made from a slurry of dried potatoes and wheat starch seasoned with barbecue flavouring and sit on a sofa eating them not for a celebration, not even out of hunger, but just out of a mild feeling of restless boredom. Only in stage four could another person – in the same mildly bored state – be eating exactly the same crisps at the exact same moment on another sofa somewhere halfway across the world.

The Global Standard Diet

The nutrition transition has not just taken place at the level of supply. It has also altered our personal hungers so that we become people who gravitate towards the same foods. Between the 1960s and today, people around the world stopped depending so much on their own particular foodstuffs, the ones that belonged to our own families and homeland, and started eating other, alien commodities, grown in faraway places. Soon, we were eating so many of these alien foods that they stopped tasting strange to us and starting tasting normal. We changed not only the dishes we ate but the basic composition of our diets.

Nations have adjusted their food habits many times before – after all, tomatoes are not native to Italy, nor tea to Britain – but the recent global homogenisation of taste is unprecedented. All at once, billions of eaters in disparate places have started eating from the same repertoire of ingredients. Never before has such dietary change happened on such a scale, and simultaneously across most of the planet. It is a switch so pervasive and so huge that we haven’t had time to react or even to notice exactly what has changed. It is as if the colour of the sky morphed from blue to green, but before we could protest that something was not right, our eyes adjusted and we carried on as normal.

In the past, it was a fundamental fact about human beings – and about food – that people ate different things in different places. It’s in our nature as omnivores to be skilled at adapting to varied food environments. If you ask someone ‘what’s food?’ you would expect to receive wildly different answers to the question whether you were in Lagos or in Paris. In the past ‘food’ was not one thing but many, varying according to local crops, local ingredients and local ideas and prejudices.

When I was a child in the 1980s, I remember grown-ups in Britain talking with horror about the fact that the Japanese liked to eat … raw fish! It seemed so improbable. From their tone of baffled revulsion, these Britons might as well have been contemplating swallowing live frogs. I never imagined that one day those same grown-ups, older and greyer, would stroll into a perfectly normal shop on the average British high street and casually pick up a tray of sushi for lunch. We now live in a clone-world where you can get pizza in Beijing and Chinese dumplings in Rome, and not even be startled by the incongruity.

At a cultural level, some of this change has been wonderful to see (and to eat). So many of the old barriers and prejudices that kept people from experiencing each other’s food have been ripped apart. Many Westerners who used to look with suspicion on anything too garlicky or spicy or strong will now happily eat Korean-spiced barbecue or fiery Thai curries.

But if our palates have widened in some ways, they have narrowed in others, particularly at the level of ingredients themselves. When ‘food’ becomes a common language across the whole planet it stops being food at all, as our ancestors would have understood it. No matter where on the planet we live, there’s a striking convergence going on in our eating habits.

In the early 2010s, a team of researchers led by Colin Khoury, an American plant diversity expert, set out to quantify how the world’s diet had changed over the past roughly fifty years from 1961 to 2009, using food supply data from the FAO. For every country about which they could gather evidence (152 of them, representing 98 per cent of the world’s population), they measured which crops were eaten and how many per capita calories and other nutrients each of the foods delivered. Overall, the researchers looked at fifty-three different foods, from oranges to rice, from sesame seeds to corn.²³

These researchers found that there had been massive changes in eating since the 1960s. Wherever in the world you happen to live, you will now have access to much the same menu of core ingredients as someone who lives a thousand miles away in any direction. Khoury’s team referred to this phenomenon as the Global Standard Diet.²⁴

I started scrolling through the data on the FAO website trying to ascertain how the ‘average’ global eater in the 1960s differed from the average eater today. Then I realised the very question I was asking was wrong. The whole point is that in the 1960s, there was no such thing as an average eater across most countries, just lots of specific and wildly divergent patterns of eating. Back then, there were maize eaters in Brazil and sorghum eaters in Sudan. There were steak and kidney pie enthusiasts in Britain and goulash devotees in Hungary. But it made little sense to ponder how a globally average person might eat because no such person existed.

It is only now that we can, following Khoury, speak of a Global Standard Eater, because it is only now that humans have come to eat in such startlingly similar ways. Perhaps the biggest change is in the quantities that we eat – around 500 calories on average more per day than our equivalents in the 1960s (from 2,237 calories in 1961 to 2,756 calories in 2009). The Global Standard Eater consumes a whole lot more of almost everything than most eaters of the past. From the 1960s, we started to eat more refined grains and more fat, we drank more alcohol and, quite simply, we ate much more food. The average eater consumes a lot of sugar and rice and very few pulses or beans. Our diets overall are becoming sweeter and oilier and meatier and we are highly dependent for our sustenance on foods that have been grown or produced far away from the place where we live, wherever that place might be. Khoury and his colleagues have calculated that more than two-thirds of national food supplies across the world are derived from crops that are foreign to the country where they are eaten.²⁵

One grey rainy spring morning I am talking with Colin Khoury over the phone. He is at his home in Colorado, where he works at the US National Seedbank. His background, he explains, is not in nutrition but in plant science. ‘I’m a diversity person,’ he says – one of the many biologists who believe that the future of the planet depends on maintaining the maximum biodiversity for healthy ecosystems. As he and his colleagues began to draw together all the data on the world’s food supply, Khoury was startled to see just how homogenous the global diet had become, with eaters tending towards a common mean.

In Denver, where Khoury lives, the breakfast burrito is a local favourite in diners and cafés, especially at weekends. This greasy and comforting wrap is made from flour tortillas stuffed with eggs, potatoes, green chillis, maybe cheese and some kind of meat – sometimes chorizo, sometimes bacon or steak. The sandwiches are an object of local pride, like the Philadelphia cheesesteak.

To those who love it, the Denver breakfast burrito is a distinctive thing. But in another sense, this ‘local’ American speciality is not local at all. The bacon and the eggs come from giant production lines in Iowa. The eggs are fried in soybean oil from Brazil. As for the wheat that makes the tortilla that binds the whole meal together, it is the same dusty refined white flour made from the same flavourless modern strain of wheat that goes into most breads in America, from bagels to sliced Wonderbread to hotdog buns. The ingredients may be shuffled differently, but the Denver breakfast burrito is built from much the same deck of cards as a New York hamburger and fries or a pepperoni pizza in the Philippines.

‘People are eating much more of the same crops,’ Khoury tells me. ‘We have all these local twists on food but underneath it is not a huge list of species.’ In a way, the leap into stage four is like the emergence of agriculture in stage two: a narrowing of the diet which brings new diseases in its wake.

When you strip away the packaging, the recipes and the brand names, most humans – from Rio to Cairo – are getting a sizeable majority of our energy from meat, sugar, refined wheat, rice and refined vegetable oil. The average global eater largely consumes certain staple items, most of which will have been internationally traded before they reach the shop or the plate. The average eater gets the bulk of his or her daily calories (1,576) from just six sources. These are:

1 animal foods

2 wheat

3 rice

4 sugar

5 maize

6 soybeans

Of these, animal foods and wheat each contribute around 500 calories, with a further 300 calories apiece coming from rice and sugar, 200 calories from maize and 76 calories from soybeans. Compared to these big six items, all the other food commodities pale into insignificance.²⁶

There has been a startling shift away from multiple traditional diets towards a single modern one, with the same sweet-salty flavours and the same triumvirate at its heart of rice, wheat and meat.

You can trace the effects of these homogenous diets all the way to the gut. Compared to the average affluent Westerner, a hunter-gatherer from the Hadza tribe in north-central Tanzania – subsisting on an ever-changing diversity of roots and berries and wild meats – has 40 per cent more microbiome diversity (the microbiome being the host of micro-organisms in the human gut). Having a less diverse gut microbiome has been linked with both obesity and type 2 diabetes.²⁷

It’s worth noting that in some countries the move towards a global average diet has been beneficial. ‘In some places,’ Khoury points out, ‘it actually means an increase in diversity,’ certainly compared to fifty years ago. Averaged out, the world’s diet is more balanced now than it was in 1960, if balance is defined as eating an even spread of different foods. Until recently, many countries in east Asia were dangerously dependent on the single staple of rice to feed themselves. Apart from being a monotonous way to live, such single-staple diets are precarious when the single crop happens to fail – as the Irish potato famine demonstrated in the nineteenth century. Thanks to the opening up of new global markets, east Asian countries such as Vietnam have now been able to diversify into wheat and potatoes, which bestows greater food security as well as more varied nutrients.

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there’s something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods.²⁸

It might surprise you to learn (it did me) that the most average place in the world, food-wise, is not the United States, which is actually pretty extreme in the composition of its diet. To take one example, Americans have access to around twice the global average calories from meat (around 1,000 calories as against 500). Americans also consume far more sugar and sweeteners than the global mean.

To find the most average eaters in the world, you need to look to some of the middle-income countries of the developing world, especially in Latin America. These countries seem to hold up a mirror to the way food consumption is now shifting to a global mean. Purely in terms of the crops consumed, one of the most average places in the world for food is Colombia. Here, the top four sources of calories used to be maize followed by animal products followed by sugar and rice. Now the order is changed. Top of the list of Colombian foods are animal products (518 calories) followed by sugar (404 calories), then maize (368 calories) and rice (334 calories). Compared with the 1960s, people in Colombia have access to far more wheat and sugar and more refined oils.²⁹

The idea that Colombians eat in anything like an average way would once have seemed laughable. Until recently, Colombians’ food habits were not merely different from those of Europe and the US, but distinct to the point of eccentricity from the rest of Latin America. There is nothing ‘average’ about a country where people eat milk soup with eggs for breakfast, garnished with spring onions and coriander leaf. Called changua, to those reared on it this soup is as soothing as congee or chicken soup. Another distinctive element of Colombian food was its unique and abundant range of tropical fruits.

On a trip to Spain in the spring of 2017, I got into conversation with the best-selling Colombian writer Héctor Abad (author of the magical and strange book Recipes for Sad Women). We strolled through the city of San Sebastián just before sunset and Abad told me of his love of old books and old ways. He recalled that when he first travelled from Colombia to Italy, he was astonished to find that Italians ate fruit at the end of the meal rather than at the start. In the Colombia of Abad’s youth, local fruit was the opening of every dinner for those who could afford it. The fruits of Colombia range from succulent pink guavas to guanábanas, which Abad later described to me in an email as ‘a fruit with the peel of a dinosaur, and the meat a sweet humid cotton that you can easily chew’.

When Abad was eight years old, in the 1960s, an American student called Keith came to visit his family. Keith ‘almost vomited’ when Héctor’s mother offered him changua soup for breakfast. Keith was also no fan of arepas, the Colombian corn bread which used to be ground and roasted and baked fresh every day. Keith complained that in the city of Medellín there was not one place to get a hamburger. Abad was a teenager before he first tasted ‘that strange and very caloric thing called pizza’.

These days, Abad and his wife still eat the good old foods of Colombian cuisine, or as many of them as they can find. They cook a lot of soups and fish or hearty dishes of meat, rice and vegetables. But such dishes are no longer the norm for Colombians. Abad is convinced that if Keith came back to Colombia now, he would have no problem finding foods just like the ones he ate back home in Los Angeles.

Abad has noticed that young Colombians no longer eat the way that he does and that the change has happened lightning fast – ‘maybe five years, maybe ten’, he tells me. He sees young Colombians abandon the old corn arepas for breakfast in favour of Westernised sliced wheat bread. He watches as they eat hamburgers and avoid the old rice and beans. He sees them sipping not fresh fruit juices but fizzy drinks, ranging from 7 Up to Colombiana – a local drink that Abad describes as ‘sweeter than syrup’. He feels sad that the country seems to have lost its pride in the old foods. Abad’s 94-year-old mother still makes changua for herself when she is ill, but he doesn’t know anyone else who does.

What’s happening in Colombia is happening in most other countries too. Children around the world are now eating weirdly similar food to each other. You wouldn’t expect a child in Portugal and a child in China to consume the same after-school snack. But a study conducted from 2011 to 2013 across twelve countries based on interviews with more than seven thousand nine- to eleven-year-olds found that there were very similar patterns of eating across all twelve. In particular, those children who had an ‘unhealthy’ pattern of eating tended to consume near-identical foods: packaged cookies and cereal bars, branded sweets, chocolates and crackers.³⁰

Whether the children were in Australia or India, Finland or Kenya, they knew and devoured much the same things, which had nothing to do with the traditional cuisine of their country or even whether they were rich or poor. The children ate French fries and drank fizzy drinks; they ate doughnuts and crisps, cakes and ice cream. The nine-year-old in Bangalore and his or her counterpart in Ottawa had access to the same fizzy drinks, the same breakfast cereals, many of the same bagged savoury snacks. Across all the countries, the more healthy-eating children also shared similar patterns (except for the fact that children in India drank whole milk whereas those in Finland and Portugal drank skimmed milk). Children of all countries who ate ‘healthily’ ate dark leafy vegetables, orange vegetables and beans; fish and cheese; and fruit, especially bananas.³¹

If any single food illustrates the monotony of modern global diets, it is the banana. The Cavendish banana has found its way into kitchens around the world without having a great deal to recommend it as a fruit. Those soft yellow crescents have become an emblem of our food system’s lack of biodiversity. They are now not only the most popular fruit in the world but the tenth most consumed food of any kind.³²